America's Ego

2026-07-02T00:00:00.000Z

The most popular cities to visit in the world are urban meccas: think of London, Hong Kong, Paris, and New York City. These are among the most densely populated cities in the world and are highly desirable places to live. Why then did the United States decide to throw this all away and ruin the urban fabric of the country? Suburban sprawl is not inherently an American-exclusive concept, but it was pioneered here and has led the world in what it can look like, and that's a terrible mistake.

The Netherlands is at the complete opposite end of that spectrum, being one of the world's pioneers back in the late 1950s with The Green Heart (Groene Hart). This preserved open space, specifically between the center of the Randstad, was among the world's first anti-sprawl planning concepts. The idea was to focus growth inward rather than slowly sprawling outward towards the open land at the city's periphery. Farming land, as a result, would be protected. It would also lead cities in the Netherlands to continue densifying and prevent any single town from becoming a mecca like Amsterdam, compared with European peers like London or Paris.

The Netherlands was also an economic force much earlier, in the 17th century, compared to the United States, which rose to power in the early 20th century. Fortunately, technological advances such as the car weren't present during their city expansions, which led to more walkable, dense cities than we see in the United States, where many cities, such as Los Angeles, began to explode after the car became mainstream in the 1950s. Capitalism controls nearly every facet of life in the United States, and an example of this is the massive streetcar systems removed in the US, going from the world's most extensive rail infrastructure in the early 19th century to the removal of nearly all of them, followed by the tearing down of racially diverse neighborhoods and their replacement with interstates.

Suburbia and the "American Dream" of the suburban house with a white picket fence would begin to take hold in the minds of many and, with the US government subsidizing the movement, would spur a mass exodus to the suburbs in pursuit of that new dream. Some cities and states attempted to control this, such as Washington State, which passed the Growth Management Act (GMA) in 1990. However, the fatal flaw is that, while the plan would limit growth, as seen in the Netherlands, there was no change to the restrictive zoning in these cities. Even 30 years later, Seattle, the largest city in Washington State and one of the largest on the West Coast, has roughly 70% of its housing as single-family homes. Compare this to the larger cities in the Netherlands, such as Amsterdam or Rotterdam, where detached housing accounts for around 5% or less.

It took until 2023 for the State of Washington to require cities such as Seattle to create more middle housing statewide, as an extension of the original GMA. It took 33 years for the state to tell Seattle that the single-family zoning it had allowed in most of the city was no longer permitted, instead mandating that it allow up to four or six units on residential lots. This shows the United States' struggle: how one of the most progressive cities seeks to restrict growth to preserve nature and farmland, yet imposes strict limits on the types of housing that can be built. Suburbia claims even the best attempts at newer cities in the US, with only the oldest cities built before the car, such as New York City and Boston, being able to fare somewhat better against the future destruction that single-vehicle occupancy would soon cause. While Seattle and other cities across the United States may be working towards a better future, the Netherlands stands as an example of what could have been achieved and should have been achieved.

Drew Closner

America's Ego